Lost Girls and Love Hotels

Margaret is doing everything in her power to forget home. And Tokyo's exotic nightlife — teeming with intoxicants, pornography, and three-hour love hotels — enables her to keep her demons at bay. Working as an English specialist at Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute by day, and losing herself in a sex- and drug-addled oblivion by night, Margaret represses memories of her painful childhood and her older brother Frank's descent into madness.

But Margaret's deliberate nihilism is thrown off balance as she becomes increasingly haunted by images of a Western girl missing in Tokyo. And when she becomes enamored of Kazu, a mysterious gangster, their affair sparks a chain of events that could spell tragedy for Margaret, in a city where it's all too easy to disappear.

"Margaret, a 20-something Canadian, has fled to Tokyo to escape her past and now instructs aspiring stewardesses in 'cabin-crew and airline interview English.' By night, she numbs herself with drink and dangerous sex. Her story, as readers learn in alternating chapters, features an imploding family and a dangerously schizophrenic brother. Though Margaret is less than convincing as a narrator, her surreal Tokyo encounters propel the book: a barkeep who communicates with lines from Beatles songs, speakers in public bathrooms that broadcast flushing sounds, a rent-a-dog park, a Western slacker who gigs as a fake wedding minister. And, of course, the automated love hotels that Margaret frequents with a Japanese gangster. The plot lurches forward — Margaret becomes fixated on a missing Western girl, gets fired and hooks up with a man whose name she never learns before her roommate flees. There's redemption to be gained, but the fractured narrative feels like a string of bizarre moments. (July)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)